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Part 2: The hidden competitor - “We’ll build around it ourselves”
Something interesting is happening across the industry.
AI has made experimentation feel cheaper.
... so instead of immediately going out to market for the next system, a lot of organisations are pausing and asking:
Could we just build something ourselves?
A small reporting layer. A prototype dashboard. A lightweight workflow to solve one specific problem.
And to be clear - nobody is talking about anything as extreme as rebuilding their ERP from scratch.
But, as one shipping leader said at Sea Asia:
“We’re never changing ERP again - anything we need, AI can help us integrate around it.”
That’s a big shift.
Rather than replacing the core platform, teams are experimenting at the edges. Building small fixes around the outside, often with internal resources or third parties.
And sometimes, that works.
The new competitor isn’t another vendor - It’s internal experimentation
For a long time, the buying decision was simple:
Choose the best provider. Implement the system. Standardise the process.
Now there’s a third option in the room.
Teams are asking whether they can prototype their way to an answer instead - faster, cheaper, without committing to another major rollout.
AI has made that feel more realistic than it did even two years ago.
But it also changes expectations. Vendors aren’t just competing with each other anymore.
They’re competing with the belief that:
“We can probably build something good enough ourselves.”
Maritime has always been good at making do. People onboard solve problems in real time. Workarounds exist for a reason - vessels still have to move.
But there’s a line.
There’s a difference between something that works in the short term…
…and something you can trust long term.
Fleet operations aren’t just about getting an answer once. They’re about consistent data, auditability, regulatory confidence, accountability between ship and shore.
A prototype might answer one question.
A platform has to support the business every day, under pressure, for years.
That is the difference between tools and systems of record.
Experimentation is healthy. It’s probably overdue.
But maritime can’t run on prototypes forever.
In Part 3, I’ll come back to what really matters underneath all of this - trust, accessibility, and why the real bottleneck in shipping isn’t data volume. It’s data access.
Ready to talk? Get in touch today ...
Niall Jack
Chief Technical Officer